After this experience, the peasants gave up their meetings and returned to their ploughs." [Illustration: Knights returning from Foray----311] This is a literal translation of the monkish chronicler, who was far from favorable to the insurgent peasants, and was more for applauding the suppression than justifying the insurrection.

The suppression, though undoubtedly effectual for the moment, and in the particular spots it reached, produced no general or lasting effect.

About a century after the cold recital of William of Jumieges, a poet-chronicler, Robert Wace, in his _Romance of Rou_, a history in verse of Rollo and the first dukes of Normandy, related the same facts with far more sympathetic feeling and poetical coloring.

"The lords do us nought but ill," he makes the Norman peasants say; "with them we have nor gain nor profit from our labors; every day is, for us, a day of suffering, toil, and weariness; every day we have our cattle taken from us for road-work and forced service.

We have plaints and grievances, old and new exactions, pleas and processes without end, money-pleas, market-pleas, road-pleas, forest-pleas, mill-pleas, black-mail-pleas, watch-and-ward-pleas.